Most of the average company's capital investment portfolio is tied to information technology, and organizations today can't do without their information systems.

Meanwhile, the role of IT is expanding within and outside organizations; and with the extent of current global connectivity, the decisions of one corporation can affect many other enterprises.

Add to this situation the increased emphasis on corporate governance in the wake of scandals such as Enron, and the reasons are clear for IT to warrant greater attention from boards of directors.

A recent Cutter Consortium survey explored the status of IT governance in 252 firms. As might be expected, the context in which these judgments are made bears on the relevance of these opinions to our readers. For instance, firms with large IT shops (i.e., those with at least 500 employees) represent a relevant comparison only for those in similar environments. Also, the responses from employees at firms in which there is a harmonious business-IT relationship suggest a very different interpretation than those responses from firms in which the relationship is adversarial.

The dysfunctional relationship between business people and IT organizations has impeded technological progress for too long. IT has contributed a great deal to productivity and business agility over the years, but it has consistently fallen far short of its potential. Don't blame hardware failures or software bugs -- it's the business-IT relationship that's broken.

Over the past few years, the IT industry has been through a lot. Many CIOs and CTOs who reported to their CEOs during the late 1990s and early 2000s have been sent back to their CFOs for supervision. And many organizations that enthusiastically decentralized both their business units and technology support organizations have since reverted to more centralized structures.

Would Hershey Foods Corporation's story of undelivered candy that piled up in the company's warehouses in 1999 and of the more than US $100 million in lost Halloween sales that year have been any different had close executive board-level oversight of the infamous enterprise resource planning (ERP) initiative taken place?

The complexity of the issues surrounding identity management -- managing user access to applications and information based on proof of identity -- is exploding as a direct result of the connectivity underlying the Internet.